How Tim Cook’s Apple missed the AI revolution

Apple CEO Tim Cook with the only vision he’ll ever have
As it scrambled to catch up to the AI revolution it missed, Tim Cook’s Apple is set to announce an array of generative AI (GenAI) features to its software products, including Siri, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing “people familiar with its plans.” The AI features are said to include assistance in message writing, photo editing, and summarizing texts.
Aaron Tilley for The Wall Street Journal:
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While Apple isn’t expected to catch up with leading AI innovators soon, the company is preparing to unveil AI features with impressive capabilities that also maximize privacy for users—a concern that will be central to unlocking the full potential of AI assistants. Apple is also expected to unveil one or more potential partnerships with major AI developers after holding talks with OpenAI, Google and Cohere, the people said.…
When Siri launched in 2011, Apple was ahead of rivals in seeking to establish the first AI assistant. [Steve] Jobs, who spearheaded the acquisition in 2010 that led to Siri, encouraged the team to keep the assistant’s dry wit and sense of humor. The early launch demonstrated the company’s willingness to take risks.
“Siri was the last thing Apple was first on,” said Dag Kittlaus, co-founder of the Siri startup that Apple bought, who left Apple soon after the product’s launch…
As Apple struggled to keep advancing Siri, the company hired one of Google’s top engineering executives to run its AI strategy: John Giannandrea. In 2018, he was elevated to the role of senior vice president, reporting directly to Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook.
In early team meetings, Giannandrea made it clear that improving Siri was a main focus. He was also tasked with centralizing much of Apple’s fragmented efforts regarding AI. He began building up his AI team by recruiting Google employees and through startup acquisitions, but his team had difficulty fitting in with the rest of Apple, according to people familiar with their work.
The new AI group operated much like parts of Google, where deadlines are more loosely defined. Teams inside Apple need to maintain rigorous deadlines to have products ready for release events every fall. Efforts to collaborate between other parts of Apple that were building products and the AI team at times fell apart because they couldn’t agree on deadlines, the people said.
Another limiting factor for Giannandrea’s AI team was the lack of access to computing resources, said former executives and engineers. Compared with rivals, Apple in recent years has secured fewer chips known as graphical-processing units that are essential for training AI models, said people familiar with Apple’s internal infrastructure.
Much of the AI team had to rely on external cloud services—Google’s cloud was preferred by many of the former Google employees on Giannandrea’s team—to train their AI models, the people said.
When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, everything changed. Federighi, the software chief, became a convert that Christmas break after he began playing around with the Microsoft-owned GitHub AI coding tool called Copilot, which is powered by OpenAI’s technology, said people familiar with his experience.

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MacDailyNews Take: Ay yi yi.
The story, that we’ve been clearly reporting in our Takes for months, is finally being widely reported. You read it here first.
Very few people have watched Apple as closely and for as long as we have:
Apple needs new leadership. The company needs vibrant, visionary, risk-taking leadership again. Apple’s “caretaker CEO” era* should have ended years ago.
*iterating products and services conceived by/under Steve Jobs
Apple pays and has been paying John Giannandrea, Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, millions upon millions of dollars for years. WTF of any import does he really do? WTF of any import has he really delivered? Have you used Siri lately? Yup, it’s still a steaming pile of dogshit.
Where’s Apple’s generative AI, John? “Too hard; too late; look for partners; gimme my paycheck and stock options.”
AAPL shareholders need to start asking real questions of these executives, especially those who are supposed in charge of Apple’s “AI Strategy,” when the company clearly has none. How about some accountability for once? – MacDailyNews, March 18, 2024
As we explained in early April:
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Apple was caught flat-footed, due to a lack of vision on the part of leadership. They were, uh, focused elsewhere. Apple’s traditional data center network is not fit for generative AI. It will take years and billions of dollars to catch up just to where GenAI leaders (OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, etc.) are today.
So, the only solution is to partner with a [Google, OpenAI, Baidu, etc.] for the real GenAI stuff while pretending (marketing) really hard that some on-device AI Apple has whipped up in a few months is “insanely great Apple innovation” that’s at the heart of Apple’s 2024’s AI announcements when it’s really just an adjunct… Watch Apple make a big show of its on-device AI at WWDC and run many ads touting it from June onwards.
Apple hopes to buy time for the data center buildouts and investments that will be required for them to someday own their own AI technology and not have to license it from the likes of [Google, OpenAI, Baidu, etc.].
This is what happens after a decade plus with a caretaker CEO at the helm after he hits the last page of his iteration playbook, yet attempts to stay in the game for too long.
See also:
• Work on Apple Vision Pro began under Steve Jobs – August 23, 2023
• Contrary to popular belief, Steve Jobs knew about Apple Watch – February 13, 2023

The good news is that the average age of outgoing CEOs across the S&P 1500 is 61.6 and Tim Cook will turn 64 on November 1st.